Superintendents, school leaders, instructional coaches, and experienced teachers must support and develop talent to improve student experiences and outcomes.

One avenue for addressing this need is to establish coaching partnerships. How might one create conditions for these learning partners to engage in productive and fertile processes that generate their own momentum?

What follows are three pillars to support such processes, with assorted references.

Look and Listen for the Authentic

In every district, school, and classroom, if one knows how to look, authentic moments sparkle like stars in the inky firmament, and they will lead the way. Coaches should be especially attentive for them and point them out:

• a student confident and vulnerable enough to share their experience
• another who takes the risk of offering a wrong answer
• a teacher admitting they don’t know
• students rapping in the hallways
• the beautiful messiness of reading complex texts
• disagreements about ideas and objectives
  

Note that these authentic moments are often things school leaders and teachers wish did not happen. Sometimes they take us off track, or divert us from The Plan.

Ruminating on those moments helps uncover what the human beings in schools really care about, and their sources of energy, curiosity, and excitement.

Rob Riordan, founder of High Tech High and coaching guru, masterfully identified these moments, even in classrooms where seemingly not much good was happening. “There was a wonderful moment…” he would begin, in a conversation afterward with the teacher.

Almost inevitably, this line of discussion empowers the coach to ask, “How can you get more of that?”, which in turn opens the door for creation and collaboration.

Directing your efforts toward growing and spreading authentic moments makes its antithesis, the problem-solving approach, feel as if you were pushing for a long time on a door that is actually a pull.

For some language and examples of what authenticity looks like in schools, see:

• EL Education’s Attributes of High Quality Work, see the “authenticity” section
• The “Authentic Work” design principle from High Tech High
• This Getting Smart article on making student work authentic identifies some key elements

Establish Trust in Multiple Dimensions

At its most impactful, coaching is deeply human work and its success relies at least in part on the quality of the trust established in the partnership. This is is the most complex pillar, not least because both parties continually manage and re-assess the relationship based on an infinite number of factors.

Some coaching rhythms that can help with deepening mutual trust include:

• openly acknowledging the elements of culture, identity, race, gender identity, and class that inhere in all human interactions, especially the coach-coachee relationship. For those new to this territory, being direct can help open a conversation: “I just want to name that I am […] and am aware of this, and I am open to discussing how we can navigate this in our partnership.” This may seem stilted, but oppression and racism have been around for too long for us avoid these conversations.
• working to understand the coachee’s sense of identity, purpose, and vision for success as an educator. Again, this can involve asking directly about these things and using them as touchstones in subsequent conversations.
• allowing the leader or teacher to make decisions and then creating time and space to constructively reflect on decisions. Ultimately, this will be the key to growth.
• collecting and gathering data and conducting collegial inquiry together. This is actually a move toward a “trustless” relationship — one where trust isn’t necessary, since the focus is on empirical facts. 

For more on trust and decision-making, see:

• Coaching guru Elena Aguilar’s take on building trust.
• This collection of research makes the case for leadership coaching and describes the anatomy of a coaching session intended to build trust.
• National Equity Project’s explanation of why good decisions trump best practices.
• My own “PBL Coaching Launch” document, that solicits teacher vision.

Holding a Theory of Adult Learning

The compexity of human beings requires an intuitive grasp or a deep, hard-won understanding of adult learning and how to foster both short term and long term growth.

A piece on Leadership Coaching by the Northwest Comprehensive Center highlights two key elements to keep in mind about short term growth:

Most adult learners will not immediately begin to apply what they have learned; if they are to implement and sustain new practices over time, they will require coaching and feedback in the context of ongoing practice. In addition, adult learners require feedback that is specific, positive, relevant, growth-oriented, and focused on their own goals.

Drawn from Speck & Knipe’s research, 2005, emphasis mine.

When turning to long term growth, we enter the huge field of adult learning, but a great place to start is Eleanor Drago-Severson’s work, which draws on Robert Keegan’s constructive-developmental framework, an epistemological guide for assessing adults.

In essence, Drago-Severson argues that understanding an adults’ “way of knowing” can inform how to impact their practice and–as practically important to work in schools but quite a bit more personally profound–how to create and maximize opportunities for transformative learning.

Transformative learning is the sort that can move a person along the constructive-developmental framework, and it is ultimately liberatory in nature.

Free, committed humans are not paradoxes. Rather, as Paulo Freire himself puts it, transformative education becomes “the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.” 

And he goes on: “Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.”

Coaches who create conditions for transformative learning experiences are working high-leverage territory. For more on adult learning, check out:

• Tell Me So I Can Hear You, Ellie Drago-Severson’s book that outlines a developmental approach to giving feedback to educators.
• Brief video of D-S, in case you don’t have time for the book.
• Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire.

Those are some pillars of my coaching, at least for now. I circle back to them when stuck and ask:

• How can authentic moments lead the way?
• How might I deepen trust?
• How can I cultivate conditions for liberation and transformation?

What are the pillars that support your coaching moves?